Animatics testing setup

Overview

An animatic is a rough, low-cost version of a video ad, typically a sequence of storyboard frames with basic motion, voiceover, or music, made before investing in full production. Animatics testing lets you validate a creative direction, story structure, or message early, while it's still cheap to make changes.

Why test an animatic instead of a finished ad

A full TVC production is expensive and slow to change once it's shot. Testing an animatic first lets you catch problems, confusing narrative, weak message clarity, wrong emotional tone, before committing to a full shoot. It's a deliberate trade-off: an animatic looks rougher than a finished ad, so you're not testing production quality, you're testing whether the underlying idea works.

How to set this up in Decode

Use a Media block the same way you would for a finished ad, see Set up a media block. Upload your animatic using Local Media, since animatics are rarely hosted externally the way a finished ad might be on YouTube.

Because an animatic is intentionally rough, keep your framing around what you're testing in mind when adding follow-up questions:

• Focus questions on story clarity, message understanding, and emotional direction, rather than production polish, since participants should be told (via your study's context or instructions) that they're viewing a rough cut, not a finished ad
• Enable Facial Coding if you want to check emotional response to the story beats, even in rough form
• Eye Tracking is less useful here than for a finished TVC, since a rough animatic doesn't have the same visual polish or branding placement you'd be checking attention against

What to look for in results

See Read media block results. For an animatic specifically, weigh open-ended feedback about story and message clarity more heavily than raw emotional or attention scores, since participants are reacting to a concept, not a finished production.

What to do next

Once your creative direction is validated, see TVC effectiveness setup for testing the finished ad.